The result to me was quite unexpected! The old Clearlooks had RTL (opposite direction) animation, yet only 1 or 2 people every complained about that! But then again, animation was always disabled by default, so not many people ever noticed that.

I guess it’s clear what the mainstream preference is now. You can still vote, but I doubt it’s gonna make a difference. I’ll probably make it a an option in gtkrc eventually, so that themers can decide in which direction it should animate.

Thank you all for voting and commenting!

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I don’t think animation for progress bars should be enabled by default. It doesn’t make sense in certain contexts where progress bars are used. For example in GNOME when you press a volume up/down key, the dialog that pops up uses a progress dialog to signify what level the volume is at. But clearly, in this context, the progress bar is not being used to convey progress of some event happening, it is only a visual cue for the level of volume currently selected. It looks weird to see the progress bar animated in contexts such as this. Wouldn’t it make more sense to integrate the animation into the GTK API for the progress bar instead of having it in the theme engine? If there was added API for this, application developers can enable the animation programatically whenever it makes sense to do so. Logically I don’t think it makes sense to have animation controlled by the theme engine. Thoughts?

I’m against what has been said upper, I think that make progress bars animated reveal the powerfull of GTK, and the non-obsolescence of it.

Moreover, I’d say that it’d be very important to develop other “animations” for widgets like buttons : smooth passage from inactive state to focus state or onmouseover state ( by a sort of smooth fading effect ) would be more than nice, and should be very eyecandy and attractive.

Disabling effects is for sure important, but we must make them active by default. We’ve enter the eye-candy era, remember it.

I would lie if I have said that I’m rather found to eyecandy - I like very functional and polished desktop like GNOME is. However, new Cairo based Clearlooks theme and animated progress bar is something I have felt in love since I saw them.

Believe me, they are worth that. They are nice, not intruding, will be welcomed by common crowd and be loved (or hated) by geeks.

Sadda, I realize that the progress bar is being abused for things it shouldn’t be used, but a progress bar is meant to indicate progress, not volume levels or diskspace usage.

Animated progress bars gives people the sense that GTK+ has finally entered the 21th century. This means that some applications might get odd behaviour today, but hopefully in time these applications will switch to a more appropriate widget (whatever that may be).

Thanks for the way you set up the poll, Richard. While (as someone else has commented already) it would be even better to demonstrate with an actually *moving* progress bar, the way you actually presented it (showing three choices, easily distinguishable) made me pick an option in a situation where I would not have been able to well picture the three choices had they been described only verbally. Not that I’d like everything developers do to be based on (and certainly not subject to) public approval through such polls, but it worked well in this case, and I hope to see more of this. (In cases where the person designing an effect is himself — or herself — ambivalent about the outcome at least.)

Richard, I see your point. For example, the System Monitor app in GNOME, for disk space usage, seems to use a widget that looks like a progress bar but it is not animated. So, I’m assuming there are widgets in GTK that signify “percentages” as opposed to progresses. So, I guess using a progress bar widget for the volume up/down dialog could be considered a wrong choice of widget for that specific application.

BTW, clearlooks-cairo looks great and I have been testing it out the CVS version for the past couple days on my Fedora rawhide install. I also have the Tango icons installed. It will be great when all of this new artwork is integrated into the stable release of GNOME. It will be nice when the distros can just compile the stock GNOME release and not have to do much artwork integration (e.g. bluecurve), and be proud of the results. This will also lead to a consistency in visuals across distros. So whether you are running Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandrake, or what have you, one will know they are running GNOME. Because of this work, the sceptic claim of, “the Linux desktop is inconsistent,” is rapidly becoming null and void.

Hmmm without seeing it I’d say left to right, but right-to-left looks better as it makes it look faster, even when the bar is not moving it gives the impression of speed whereas left-to-right looks slower.

That true to me now. If you think about it as a spiral spinning in or out like a threaded bolt or such, then RTL actually does make sense, since that would represent spinning upwards and thus to the right.
If the slant of the spiral is reversed, then LTR will look correct.

Consider the LtR spinning version with the progressbar advancing at the same speed as the animation does. Or consider it with the bar growing more quickly than the animation, or more slowly. It will give a different feel of the progress each time. I don’t know if that is good or bad. Does it enhance the feeling of progress or diminish it? I would have to see it in action to decide.
I think in the RtL vesion it doesnt matter what speed the bar progresses, it will always give the same effect. Or will it?

You’re right, Tino. If the animation moves in the same direction as the progressbar moves, when the progressbar moves at the same speed at the animation, it will cancel out the animation (the animation will appear to stall).

This never happens when the animation moves in the opposite direction.

I’ve since installed Clearlooks with scrollbar animation and I voted Left-to-right animation. And I regret it! I never realised how much more sense right-to-left made, and now that I’ve actually experienced the difference, I wish I could change my vote…